Up the Hill and Over eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 381 pages of information about Up the Hill and Over.

Up the Hill and Over eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 381 pages of information about Up the Hill and Over.

The girl was thoroughly interested now.  She was flattered also.  Miss Annabel had been right.  Something was troubling the minister.  And she, Esther, was to be his confidant.  To her untroubled, girlish conceit (girls are very wise!) it seemed natural enough.  She had no doubt of her ability to help him.  Therefore her face and her answering “Yes?” were warmly encouraging.

It is a general belief that a woman always knows, instinctively, when a man is going to propose to her.  She cannot be taken unawares; her flutter, her surprise, her hesitancy are assumed as being artistically suitable, but her unpreparedness is never bona fide.  If this be the true psychology of the matter then Esther’s case was the exception which proves the rule.  No warning came to her, no intuition.  She was still looking at the minister with that warm expression of impersonal interest, when, without further preliminaries, he began his halting avowal of love.

Had the poor pink rose-bush suddenly flamed into crimson she could scarcely have been more surprised.  She caught her breath with the shock of it!  But shocks are quickly over.  One adjusts one’s self with incredible swiftness.  A moment—­and it seemed to Esther that she ought to have been expecting this.  That she ought to have known it all along.  Thousands of trifles mocked at her for her blindness, thousands of unheeded voices shrieked the truth into her opened ears.  She felt miserably guilty.  Not yet had she arrived at the stage when she could justify her blindness and deafness to herself.  Later, she would understand how custom, the life-long habit of regarding the minister as a man apart, had helped to dull her perception.  Later, common sense would prove her innocent of any wilful blunder.  But just now, in her first bewilderment, it seemed that nothing could ever excuse that lack of understanding which had made this declaration possible!

“I love you, Esther!  I have loved you for two years.” (It was like the Reverend Angus to refer to the exact period.) “You must have seen it.  This can be no surprise to you.  You may blame me in your heart for not speaking sooner.  But you were young.  There seemed time enough.  Then, lately, when I saw that you were no longer a child, I decided to speak as soon as your mother should have returned.  But to-day I felt that I could not wait longer.  I must know at once—­now!  I must hear you say that you love me.  That you will be my wife.  You will—­Esther?”

His impassioned tones lingered on the name with ecstasy.

The startled girl forced herself to look at him, a look swift as a swallow’s dart, but in it she saw everything—­the light on his face—­the love in his eyes!  And something else she saw, something of which she did not know the name but from which, not loving him, she shrank with an instinctive shiver of revolt.  He seemed a different man.  The minister, the teacher, was gone, and in his place stood the lover, the claimer.  Yes—­that was it.  He claimed her, his glance, his voice—­somewhere in the girl’s heart a red spark of anger began to glow.

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Up the Hill and Over from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.